Three MBA student teams will compete in the final round of the Corporate Knights-Schulich Business for a Better World Case Competition Jan. 23 in Davos, during the World Economic Forum annual conference.
The qualifying teams come from York University's Schulich School of Business, the University of Victoria’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business and the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Twenty-six teams from around the world registered for the second annual competition, which was established in 2013 in partnership with Corporate Knights magazine, the world’s largest circulation magazine with an explicit focus on responsible business.
Teams were asked to create a sustainability-driven business plan for the case subject, Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis. Their challenge was to identify a wide range of social, environmental and governance metrics to boost Novartis’s standing on the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking so that the company surpasses its industry peers on sustainability performance.
Their Round 3 presentations in Davos will be in front of a live panel of high-profile judges. The winning team will receive a $6,000 prize. Last year’s winner was Sweden’s Stockholm School of Economics, which had the challenge of elevating the sustainability performance of Canadian oil developer Suncor Energy.
“The teams have worked very hard to reach this final stage of the Business for a Better World Case Competition,” said Dirk Matten, one of the competition organizers. “It’s a pleasure to see the calibre of innovative solutions to sustainability problems that MBA students from some of the leading business schools in the world are able to develop.”
For more information, visit the Corporate Knights-Schulich Business for a Better World Case Competition website.